Europe can step up on defence. Escaping America will be far harder.

This text was initially published in Le Figaro, in French, on July 8, 2026.

Europeans appear to have accepted the idea that the nature of US engagement is shifting, according to researchers Sophia Besch and Tara Varma. They hope to secure greater predictability from Washington at the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7-8, but they risk being disappointed, the researchers add.

A year ago in The Hague, NATO's leaders sent Donald Trump home satisfied. They promised to spend 5% of GDP on defence and reaffirmed the Article 5 mutual defense pledge. “Daddy” Trump claimed a victory his predecessors never managed: The freeloaders, at last, would pay.

The bargain did not last the year. Higher spending did not stop Trump coveting Greenland, nor keep Washington from trying to pull Europe into a war with Iran, nor stop the Pentagon withdrawing forces from the continent. Europe's old tricks stopped working. The flattery, the careful avoidance of a row, the lopsided trade deal struck at Turnberry in 2025 only weeks after The Hague—none of it bought lasting goodwill or even stability.

So, Europeans have stopped answering intimidation with accommodation. The turn came in January 2026, when Trump pressed his claim to Greenland and the EU threatened, for the first time, to use its new anti-coercion instrument Washington relented. Europe had shown that it can raise the domestic price of American coercion, a lesson future White House occupants will have to weigh. Since then, the talk in European capitals has been of insurance: a payments system that sidesteps the dollar, a more European NATO, a European nuclear deterrent to sit alongside the American one.

The question hanging over Ankara is what American power in Europe now comprises and how much of it Europe can replace.

For most of the postwar era, that power rested on military, economic, and technological dependencies, and on Europe's trust—its readiness to align with Washington and lend it legitimacy.

The trust is draining away fast. A liberal, multilateral America and a revisionist MAGA one increasingly pull against each other: two rival versions of the country competing for different European constituencies. As a result, US favorability has fallen by 20 percentage points or more in a single year across much of Europe.

But to become more independent in military, economic, energy, and technology terms, Europe has only two escape routes: build at home or find another supplier in China.

In the military domain, building at home is beginning to work. America's military leverage holds for now, but it will erode. Europe's rearmament is unprecedented in scale and ambition, backed by the broadest political consensus in postwar Europe. Procurement is shifting away from US systems, regional defense-industrial cooperation is gathering pace, and Europeans are rethinking their nuclear options. Progress is slowed by enduring capability dependencies, national procurement instincts and NATO planning built around the United States. The next few years, as Europe races against the clock to deter Russia, are dangerous. But the sea change is unmistakable.

Europe's other dependencies are stickier. Ankara brings with it debates about troops, spending and command structures in the one domain where American leverage is genuinely shrinking. The European dependencies that are deepening are not on the agenda.

As AI becomes foundational to productivity, state capacity and military capability itself, Europe's technological dependence may come to supplant the structural role that security dependence has played since 1949. There is no European AI project to rival the American tech stack. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google run about 70% of Europe's cloud. Europeans have rallied behind the need to defend themselves, but they cannot compute without America.

The same goes for banking, trading, and heating their homes. European investors hold some $15 trillion in American assets, and the dollar still settles much of the continent's trade. US liquefied natural gas, locked in by multi-decade contracts, filled the hole left by Russian gas. And the second escape route is shut: Most Europeans know that leaning on Beijing would swap one dependence for a worse one.

Where does this leave the transatlantic bond?

At The Hague a year ago, Europeans were still trying to talk this administration out of shrinking its role on the continent. In Ankara they arrive with a humbler aim: to work alongside it and make the transition to a Europe with less America more managed.

NATO amounts to more than the American promise to defend Europe and deter Russia, but little of value is left standing without that promise. Europeans mean to change that. They have made their peace with the fact that the American commitment is changing. What they are asking for is an orderly version of it. They are likely to be disappointed.

Predictability takes two things: a settled sense of direction and the bureaucratic machinery to carry it out coherently. Neither is on offer from an administration this divided and this personalized, built around the moods of a single man. US defense officials, some of whom have a clear vision of burden shifting and a NATO 3.0 but find themselves constantly undermined by their leader, have spent months dressing up their boss's volatility as the virtue that keeps Europeans alert and too anxious to lapse into old habits.

The best Europe can hope for in Ankara is that Trump, satisfied his officials have frightened the allies enough, settles for the warm glow of the NATO photo-op.

But the sui generis nature of the Trump administration should not distract from the quiet recasting of the transatlantic relationship taking place in the background. Future US presidents, even unsentimental ones, will eventually offer Europeans a clearer account of American interests. European dependencies will still be there when they do. The trust will not. Nor will the deference that has stood in for it since Trump's return. 

The post-1945 bargain, in which a benign hegemon underwrote European order in exchange for deference, was always exceptional. What follows could be more ordinary: a conventional relationship between asymmetric partners, held together by overlapping interests. There is no normalcy to return to. But the transatlantic relationship could become normal for the first time.

Sophia Besch is a senior fellow in the Europe program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The views expressed herein are those solely of the author(s). GMF as an institution does not take positions.